Victoria could afford to give motorists a $1-an-hour break on Sunday street parking and still cover the costs of providing transit passes for youth, city staff say.
The city is set to start charging for street parking downtown on Sundays effective May 1, using the revenue to pay for transit passes for those under 18. Parking downtown is currently free on Sundays. Staff note that most professional offices and some businesses are closed Sundays, resulting in less parking demand, so councillors could consider reduced Sunday parking rates with no time restrictions.
Introducing a lower rate — $2 per hour rather than $3 per hour in the 90-minute zone and $1 per hour in outlying metered areas — with no time limit would generate revenue while allowing shoppers and visitors to stay longer downtown, says a report going to councillors Thursday.
Mayor Lisa Helps said council could consider adopting the lower rate on a trial basis. “Since it’s new, it might be worth trying for the first year or the remainder of this calendar year and see how it goes.”
Twenty-minute meters would remain in place to ensure parking turnover in those spots.
Estimated annual revenue from Sunday parking with the lower rates would be about $500,000, compared with $600,000 at weekday rates.
The report notes that four additional staff will be required to enforce Sunday parking, but additional fine revenue is expected to offset the extra staffing costs.
The report notes that with the shift to metered street parking on Sundays, it will be important to watch for any impact on nearby areas that are not metered.
Parkades are to remain free on Sundays, but city staff intend to increase monthly parking rates by 10 per cent beginning June 1.
The increase would be the first since May 2017. The monthly rate at the Broughton, View and Yates streets parkades will increase to $240 from $220. The Johnson Street parkade rate jumps to $200 from $185 and the Centennial Square parkade goes to $180 from $165.
Rate increases typically reduce the number of monthly parkers, making more stalls available for short-term parkers. In 2016, 30 per cent of parkade stalls were rented monthly. That dropped to 25 per cent in 2017 and 23 per cent in 2018.
Helps said she supports the increase in long-term parkade rates, noting that even after the increase, the city’s parkade rates are a little cheaper than nearby private rates.
“There’s no reason that public parking should be cheaper than private parking. We shouldn’t be subsidizing vehicle traffic any more than the private sector should be subsidizing vehicle traffic,” she said.
In 2014, the city introduced a number of parking changes, including reducing rates, making the first hour in parkades free and making parkades free after 6 p.m., in hopes of increasing parkade use, along with turnover in on-street parking.
Parkade transactions have steadily grown since, totalling almost 1.7 million last year, up from about 874,000 in 2014.
More than 70 per cent of motorists using parkades are parking less than three hours, indicating shoppers and other visitors to the downtown core are generally able to find space in parkades, staff say.
While city parkades are now regularly full weekdays between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., lineups generally move quickly, staff say.
Turnover for the almost 800 parking spaces in the 90-minute zone in the downtown core is fairly brisk. The average transaction fee is about $2.48, or a stay of about 50 minutes.
DOWNTOWN VICTORIA PARKING
• The city manages nearly 4,300 parking spots: 2,000 on street, more than 400 on surface parking lots and 1,935 in parkades.
• Metered stalls were installed on 57 spaces in the 800-block of Humboldt Street in 2018.
• Parking is a money-maker. Almost $900,000 in 2018 surplus was due to increased parking revenue from on-street meters, Royal Athletic Park parking, fines, parkades and on-street occupancy permits paid by developers.
• The popularity of the city’s parking app continues to grow. Almost 30 per cent of transactions were made using the app in 2018, versus about 23 per cent in 2017. The percentage of people paying by coin dropped to 39.1 per cent from 45 per cent, while credit-card payment was relatively stable at 26.7 per cent. About 4.2 per cent used a parking card.
• Of the 1,935 parkade spaces, 23 per cent are used by monthly parkers.
• In 2018, 72 per cent of parkade transactions were for less than three hours, 20 per cent stayed three to seven hours and eight per cent parked all day.
• In 2018, parkade transactions increased by 10.5 per cent from 2017.
• The number of tickets written by the city’s “parking ambassadors” — in-house employees who replaced the Corps of Commissionaires three years ago — is increasing. The total violations issued in 2018 was 156,443 — almost 15 per cent more than the 135,713 issued in 2017.
• The city cancelled 39,011 tickets in 2018, with the largest proportion (30 per cent) cancelled because they were being written as the driver returned to the vehicle. In 2016, the city cancelled 28,824 tickets.
